Democrat Trainwreck in Georgia

My friend Thomas, over at RedState, has this piece up about the Democrats crumbling in Georgia. He writes, in part:

In 2004, the destruction of the Democrats, by then a quixotic coalition of rural, conservative, mostly white Democrats and urban liberal Democrats of various races, genders, and sexual orientations, became complete. The Republicans swept in to the Georgia House of Representatives and improved their Senate position — this time under court drawn maps that were more favorable to them.

2006 is upon us. In just the past few weeks, several prominent Democrats who once ruled the General Assembly have announced either their retirements or their new affiliations as Republicans. The Georgia Republican Party spent the first three months of the year raising $3,793,518.83 compared with Democrat efforts yielding just $493,495.15. The GOP now has cash on hand of $4 million versus just $400,000.00 for the Democrats.

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8 comments

This is splitting hairs given that the figures are abyssmal for Dems either way, but I find it funny that $3.79 million somehow rounds up to $4 million for the GOP while $493K somehow gets rounded down to $400K… this when the exact figures are listed the sentence before.

I get the Fair Tax thing now anyway… it’s because Republicans can’t do math.

I wasn’t really arguing the merit of the Fair Tax one way or the other, merely commenting on the supposed simplicity of it.

However, if you’d gone to college in Tennessee like I did you’d be against a sales tax-only system. The state had a constant problem with predicting revenue because of its tax model, which often led to threats of the university and parks systems being shut down due to sudden and urgent budget shortfalls.

In my case, I was one class short of graduating in 2002 when a budget crisis threatened to shut down the second term of summer school. In fact, the first term of summer school was shortened by nearly a week because of the budget crisis. Had the second term been canceled, I (along with more than 1,000 others who also were graduating at the same time) would have been stuck in Knoxville for an entire fall semester just to take one (or perhaps in their case two) classes.

And it’s presumptuous to call me a Democrat. I’d vote a split ticket if the Republican Party hadn’t gone all theocratic on me the past couple of decades.

Erick, I stand corrected, but the paragraph could have been written more clearly. Somehow I doubt cash on hand is exactly the number cited for either party, so I still wonder about those estimates.

“[Tennessee] had a constant problem with predicting revenue because of its tax model, which often led to threats of the university and parks systems being shut down due to sudden and urgent budget shortfalls.”

Actually, Tennessee’s budget shortfalls have less to do with its tax system and more to do with the spending habits of its Legislature. Despite having a population that is one-third less than Georgia’s, Tennessee consistently has a budget that is one-third MORE than Georgia’s budget.

Why is this so? A lot of it can be blamed on TennCare, the state’s medicaid program. Having expanded the income requirements to the point it might make Mrs. Clinton blush, TennCare provided service to literally one-quarter of the state’s population. Let that sink in. 25 percent of the state’s residents had their fellow citizens pick up most, if not all, of their health care costs. In some counties, such as Grundy, nearly half of residents were on TennCare.

Thankfully, the tide has started to turn somewhat. Current Gov. Phil Bredesen cut the rolls by 200k last year as TennCare was on the brink of insolvency. He also cut the scope of services to those left on the rolls.

And although it was a Democrat who started the program, it was a Republican governor who oversaw TennCare’s rapid expansion during the ’90’s. This should be a lesson to the Georgia GOP. Although judging by their spending record during the last two years, it doesn’t look to be a lesson most of the caucus is willing to heed.